/lit/ - Literature

Now, some may have realized that Ch’an Buddhist teachings on the Buddha-nature or the One Mind, and even practices of holding onto and looking devotedly and directly into a hua t’ou or “head-word” such as, “What was your original face before you were born?” or, “Who is repeating the Buddha’s name?” are rather similar to someone like Ramana Maharshi’s process of self-inquiry. However, this may lead to an apparently difficult question: “One is an Indian Vedantic jnanayogi, the others are Chinese, Japanese, or Korean Ch’an or Zen masters. Because the cultures, terminology, and rituals are different, they cannot be reconciled.”

Such a question shows a petty clinging to conditioning and culture in direct contradiction of the truth itself, which fundamentally has no original culture, dwelling-place, or home, but manifests throughout all cultures, dwelling-places, and homes equally. In Indian yogic terminology, such arguments of cultural influencers reveal a clinging to the conditioning and defilements of the ahamkara (lit. “I-maker” or “ego-maker,” the creation of a conditioned habitual personality as a veil over the Atman), and, in the terminology of the Tsao-Tung Zen sect, it bespeaks being trapped in the “guest” position of a worldly karmic ego as opposed to the “host position” of innate Buddha-hood. To associate Zen with archery, calligraphy, flower-arranging, strict sitting in the lotus position, Japanese nationalism and cultural conditioning, a lotus flower, serving and drinking of tea, quaint Zen chants and music, an image of a pond, the setup of a zendo, or an eccentric yet strangely masculine, vigorous Japanese Zen monk striking you on the back with a stick as you meditate to awaken you from your drowsiness and sharpen your insight, are all OK as far they go but, if taken too seriously, ultimately bespeak a confinement in the “guest” position of a worldly ego which has taken on Japanese cultural conditioning, or a Japanese-conditioned ahamkara, as a detour from the actual quest for the awakening of self-nature. To associate it, also, with merely sitting still, quieting the mind, being calm and stoical, the perennial philosophy, pantheism, panentheism, the New Age, hallucinogenic drugs, Alan Watts, and wild, crazy, iconoclastic supracultural Zen in the vein of Rajneesh, is also, again, OK as far as it goes for being a potential introduction to Zen, but, if clung to too seriously, again bespeaks a confinement in the “guest” position of the unenlightened ego with a New-Age-conditioned ahamkara and a distraction from the serious quest for Buddhahood.

Any detractors who wish to argue simply for the sake of arguing, clearly like arguing more than they like the immediate waking up of looking into self-nature.

>>20541261
And then how does Traditionalism deal with someone like Ramana Maharshi, who didn’t have a physical, external, human guru but attained moksha and became a very advanced teacher of Advaita Vedanta?

The real and nameless “Tradition” is beyond even “Traditionalism” (TM), which certainly contains many fantastic insights within itself but even then shouldn’t be another idol to be reared and blindly worshiped.

Of course, most people are not and will not conceivably in this lifetime ever even BE into something as seemingly “far-out” as the comparative study of religions, as a genuine student of religion or seeker-after-spiritual-truth and not just as a mere academic or sociologist-of-religion or even a missionary of one faith learning more about other faiths simply so they can learn how to better understand, argue against and persuade them and everyone that their own dogma is the supreme one. Also, even if you reading this find these posts temporarily interesting because you have some type of “occult” excitement, exotic titillation at hearing about all these different names and schools and cultures, it’s highly unlikely that they will directly enlighten you. You need a guru for that (or to somehow be self-initiated and self-enlightened, spontaneously finding the Supreme Guru within oneself at a young age, probably from brought-over latent karmic tendencies, as Ramana Maharshi apparently did (?), which, funnily enough, to most people is not even a plausible premise, a figure like Ramana Maharshi simply seeming like “another Indian huckster and part of the guru-industrialist cult,” even if it seems he had somehow reached a very high state of consciousness in himself at a young age through a spontaneous fiery dedication to it, devotion to it, and intense practice for it, which most people don’t care about). So these posts are funny in how useful they are.

>>20400431
>>20400512
An even more eccentric but entirely valid way to put it, is also that I doubt any of them had siddhis like Gurdjieff had, such as of telepathy. Ouspensky recounts eventually coming to have telepathic discussions with Gurdjieff. I doubt any of the Gurdjieff-group people are authentically telepathic, can teach telepathically like Gurdjieff did.

This is the sad fact, which Gurdjieff pointed out, that the “being” of the student is crucial, a highly-developed teacher cannot simply take people with much less developed “beings” and instantly raise them to his (or her) own level. The “being” of the student, meditator, disciple, reader is in question. It probably comes about from many reincarnations and whatever one has really learned and practiced and developed in oneself that is able to be carried on from life to life, until it finally ripens so much that in one life one decides to fully devote oneself to awakening, the path of yoga, and through one’s good karmas maybe even finds an authentic Godman, Sadguru, someone through whom God is working to teach and guide other people. You can see that figures like Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi were most likely enlightened, but not all of their disciples and followers were.

Hence, I view modern “Gurdjieff”-groups as something analogous to a “Nisargadatta-Maharaj”-group where the followers promulgating it very likely do not have the understanding of a Nisargadatta; or promulgating and carrying out a “Ramana-Maharshi”-group where they do not have the understanding and being of Ramana Maharshi (both these figures urging self-inquiry, entirely in line with G.’s practices of self-observation and self-remembering).

An offensive insight from Gurdjieff is that much of modern religions — Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism — have turned into this. “Jesus”-groups, “Buddha”-groups, “Krishna”-groups, but they do not become enlightened miracle-workers like Shirdi Sai Baba.

Gurdjieff is dead, long live Gurdjieff.

'That inner Self, as the primeval Spirit,
Eternal, ever effulgent, full and infinite Bliss,
Single, indivisible, whole and living,
Shines in everyone as the witnessing awareness.